Farm Crisis to Infinite Banking with Marlon Mueller

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Are you an entrepreneur building wealth while designing freedom? Welcome to Hunt for Success, the podcast where business, lifestyle, and the pursuit of a life well lived come together. Each week, Dr. Sam McGough sits down with founders, operators, and high performers to explore the principles, discipline, and decisions that create real success in business and in life.

From the boardroom to the back country, these are conversations about building wealth, earning freedom, and designing a life worth hunting for.

Are you an entrepreneur building wealth while designing freedom? Welcome to Hunt for Success, the podcast where business, lifestyle, and the pursuit of a life well lived come together. Each week, Dr. Sam McGough sits down with founders, operators, and high performers to explore the principles, discipline, and decisions that create real success in business and in life.

From the boardroom to the back country, these are conversations about building wealth, earning freedom, and designing a life worth hunting for.

Sam McGough (1:17)

Hey everybody, Dr. Sam McGough again here with the Hunt for Success today. I have a good friend, Marlon Mueller, who helps people with a lot of different things. He also is a farmer, so he knows a lot about the outdoors. I think we're going to have a really good conversation. We're going to learn a lot.

Welcome to the show, Marlon.

Marlon Mueller (1:35)

Thanks, Sam. It's wonderful to be here. I'm always excited about sharing my experiences with the audience.

Sam McGough (1:42)

Nice. Let's talk about that for a second.

You grew up in the Midwest in a big farm, and you managed a big farm for a while, and then you got into life insurance, and got into real estate, and you did a bunch of different things from what I know we've talked a little bit, and so I don't know exactly all the things you've done, but I do know you had a lot of different success in different areas. So if you don't mind, give us a little breakdown of where you came from, and what you did, and where you've been.

Marlon Mueller (2:09)

Yeah. So I grew up in Iowa. I was fourth generation farmer, and so I started driving truck unbelievably at the age of five. I remember dad was building fence, and he needed somebody to pull the truck, keep it running forward, and so I could barely push the clutch. So I opened it, let the clutch out, and then pushed down foot feed a little bit by setting the edge of the seat. That was my start.

Anyway, yeah, so I was fourth generation, so I was farming with my dad and my grandfather, which was his father-in-law.

Two totally different views about money and about how to farm, which is interesting. And so when I got into my 20s, two things happened. One is we hit the farm crisis and the banks shut us off. Wasn't that we're in trouble, they were in trouble and we had a lot of assets they really wanted. And that's why they shut us off to make us turn over those assets and put them on their balance sheet. I didn't know that necessarily right away. And the second thing that was happening to us was my grandfather was involved in a 34-year estate issue which, because I bought some of the farm ground that that was entitled with that lawsuit or it ended up in a lawsuit. So three generations and basically it took before it got settled. So those two things kind of redirected my life, if you want to call it that. And so just through a lot of trials and errors about finances and estate issues that, you know, over the years, I figured it out and so became pretty successful at that.

Sam McGough (3:54)

Yeah. Well, so tell me, how did you get into the life insurance game? I know you know a lot about life insurance.

Marlon Mueller (4:00)

Yeah, well, that actually started, I was probably like 26 and I didn't have a life insurance. I was, you know, newly married and this insurance agent came along. That was when interest rates were dropping and so he had this decreasing term with annuity built, it was kind of a two-part play. And the annuity was at 10 percent. I thought, wow, 10 percent, you know, I'm like, this is great, you know. So I signed up for it. Unfortunately, what happened was the next year went to 4 percent. That was a floor. I thought, well, it would take a long time to get to the floor. Very next year went to 4 percent. Well, that was back when you get 5 percent in savings.

So like this is not a good thing. Not knowing what annuity was, I mean, I was locked up.